In other news, the Kodachrome
Basin State Park [wikipedia.org] is to beconcreted over to make way
for the new Sandisk Extreme IV SDHC Mall. '"The majority of today's
consumers have voiced their preference to experience the natural world
with newer technology -- both DVD and Blu-Ray", said Mary Jane
Vizigoth, president of Kodak's Film, Photofinishing And Other Stuff
We're Trying To Get Rid Of Group. "While the Basin is a truly iconic
Park that has served tourists very well for decades, the simple truth
is that people have moved on and are no longer visiting it in
sustainable volumes."

Seriously, this is a terrible shame, though hardly a surprise (here in
the UK, we already have to post the exposed film to Kodak Switzerland,
who forward it to the only lab in the world that can process the film,
Dwayne's in Kansas). It's a bit like waking up one morning to hear that
oil paints are no longer available, but acrylics should be an adequate
substitute. Kodachrome is a truly unique film that works in a
completely different way to any other emulsion, and gives a distinctive
'look' that no other film (let alone digital) can reproduce.
Check out The
Kodachrome Project [kodachromeproject.com] to see why some of us will miss it so
much.

Actually, yeah, it really does. Data is either represented as discrete numerical values (digital) or as a continuous spectrum of values (analog). I can't really think of any form of data storage that doesn't qualify as one or the other. The mere fact that the continuous range is caused by a chemical process and not an electrical process does not mean it isn't analog.

Are you sure you understand silver-halide exposure? You're aware that individual grains are NOT either "exposed" or "unexposed". Instead, a certain number of silver nuclei in each crystal (or grain) will be present depending on how many photons the grain was exposed to. Developing helps amplify the effect, causing more of the grain to be "exposed", but by no means is it "all" or "none". Read about the chemistry of film [cheresources.com] here. In short, though, it's pretty darn analog.

Yes but grains there are, so a silver halide image can never be a seamless continuum of hue and brightness.No matter how good the grains are, there are still a (very) finite number of them.Seems we need a better definition of analogue.

By your definition, no physical medium is analogue. After all, they're all made up of molecules and atoms, and other sub-atomic particles. Electricity (and electric devices) couldn't be analogue, among other things, the electron count is discrete.

No, the Wikipedia article does not say Velvia was discontinued. It says that the original type of Velvia (RVP) was discontinued. However, new lines of Velvia are still going strong. In fact, Velvia and Provia are typically still the film of choice among professionals still shooting film.

Old Velvia was 50ASA which was insanely slow, and hard to shoot with. Wonderful with tripod but handheld was hard. I actually found it a bit over saturated, though that's a matter of opinion.

Kodachrome's death wasn't so much caused by the continuing move to digital caused by the lowering of prices on Digital SLRs....that was certainly a factor, and continues to be so. Kodachrome was a unique film with a unique developing process and there was only one lab in the world still doing it. It was always a pain in the butt to use because of the process anyway: even in Toronto my film had to be shipped to a specific lab to get developed, or mailed to Kodak directly. I hated doing that...film gets lost in transition more than any other way, and the wait was long sometimes.

Fujichrome film could be processed in a standard E-6 process, and that was readily available in even small communities not so long ago. I switched to Provia a long time ago, and never looked back.

I'm going to go buy some tonight, actually, and it's going to cost a lot less than the $1,300 for the Canon 50D, plus it doesn't have that stupid crop factor that turns my ultra wide 20mm lens into an unimpressive relatively "normal" 32mm lens.

I'm waiting for an affordable full frame digital SLR before I move. Some will argue that the 5D is it, but I would certainly NOT argue that $3,000 is affordable. In the meantime, I scan slides.

We really need to solve the damn dust problem as well, though most people tell me it's overblown. Batteries can also be an issue for those of us who like to photograph off the grid.

I think what will be the big irony of the digital revolution is that we haven't tackled the technological problems yet like getting people to back things up and store them for long periods of time. One might think that with the advent of digital that in 100 years we'll have pictures of virtually everything from this era, but because of the problems people face, we will probably yet again have a gapping hole in time filled with lost pictures.

how on earth is this insightful. Your telling me your family doesn't have an album, no wedding pictures, baby pictures ? The fact is they are priceless. I personally have processed 20 rolls of film since last year. The reason being I'm documenting time. If I had a dime for everyone who had a digital camera, a HD full of pictures and not a single hard copy to show for it.

The reason digital camera's are taking over is because it caters to a basic human trait.. laziness !!! I predict there will be a backlash when in ten years when no one no longer has there pictures. I still have pictures my father took back in the 50's not to mention I still have his old camera.

why it has to be dichotomy? I think there is place for both worlds even if some think not (owners of polaroid did not even consider selling right even if there were buyers interested in keeping production). As for digital world being definetly lost I think that is a nonsense - I have digital photos of my wedding, of my growing children etc. and they are great because we could select dozens from hundreds (or rather hundreds from thousands) - but they are all on paper now. The hand made wedding book is filled up with a properly made copies and children photos are printed in a dozen of issues each year by a company doing it in small series on basis of digital photos. While I think there is this strange disparity between your worst nightmare traces left forever in internet where you cannot even delete them and your precious photos lost because medium failure (whether physical or only due to unavailable format decoders etc) I think digital revolution has brought massive advantage in making photos while paper (or plastic) copies still remain - how nice, even funny as predictions of some silly fanatics of the 'new' failed to see the obvious i.e. that people want values and have no interest in technology itself:photo however made is a valuable artifact and it (almost) does not matter how it is made.

And then when your basement floods/house burns down/fill in disaster you lose the one single physical copy your have. The advantage to digital photos are it is very cheap to make copies of them, and/or you can store them online so you will never truly "lose" your pictures. Plus I can fit 5,000 pictures in my pocket on a thumb drive without having to carry 500 lbs. of photo albums over to someone's house to look at them. Digital photos also do not degrade with the passage of time.

That's the funny part about this discussion, all the non-photographers whom think color process pics will never degrade, as permanent as the Egyptian pyramids, blah blah.

True, PROPERLY PROCESSED black and white prints will last forever. Unfortunately the only way to tell if a B+W print was properly processed to remove all the unexposed silver and processing chemicals, and was really printed on genuinely acid-free paper, is to wait and see if it turns brown and/or stains and/or crumbles away. Pro processor

My family's house did burn down while I was in high school, with two younger siblings. Many photos were lost. Some, forever. Most are back, however, including photos of my childhood and that of my parents. Over the years, we had exchanged photos with our family. After we were settled and life had returned to normal, everyone returned pictures. We even got some new ones I'd never seen before.

Digitize your photos, if you like. Don't forget to grab all your thumb drives as you're evacuating, or

You're right, the previous post was not insightful and just shows that there is a serious lack of foresight into our future.

We're all so dammed obsessed with the present and we have a reckless disregard for both the past and the future. People ignore history and don't consider the impact decisions will have on the future. It spans everything from adopting fully-documented open standards for digital works (documents, audio and images) to erasure of privacy that humanity has worked hard to enact over many gen

Don't get me wrong, those are great and I have many... but it doesn't satisfy the fact that jpeg is a compressed file and the compression algorithms can be lost in time.

Honestly? I could understand your concern if it was about some esoteric undocumented proprietary scheme.

But JPEG is an *incredibly* widely used format and there are countless programs that can process it (including ones that can resave it in uncompressed formats, if you're really that bothered.)

It's unlikely that things would get so bad that we couldn't even reverse engineer or understand JPEG (let alone run legacy decoding apps) yet we could still conveniently access and run the computer equipment nece

And here, children, is our exhibit on the Great Collapse, also sometimes called the Second Dark Ages. The details of how it happened are sketchy, but we have abundant archaeological evidence from what is known as the Facebook Archive that 21st century humans were utterly incapable of forming coherent sentences or spelling words in their entirety, and were bizarrely obsessed with inane abbreviations like "brb," "lol," and "ur." Without any effective means of communication, commerce broke down completely,

Evade death? Beans! Sometimes photography is just a matter of seeing something you'd like to have a static reminder of. It's not always about leaving some kind of legacy. Usually it's just as simple as "Wow. That mountain scene is lovely. I'd like to see that when I get back to my office every day. "
Freakin' cynic.

Seriously, I don't know what's made you so emo, and I was just going to mod you down, but honestly, even people's most banal pictures can become important. I was an Asian Studies major in college and seeing photos from Japan's Meiji and Taisho periods was amazing. These are just family pictures or whatever.

When I lived in Yokohama, the city was celebrating 150 years since the port was opened and had hundreds of photos up of the city throughout that time.

Just because you're having fun in philosophy 101 doesn't mean photos can't be important.

It is much, much easier to back up digital for 100 years than it is to back up film.

Film stock is extremely unstable. One of the major problems in preserving old motion pictures is that the reels of film fuse together. (In fact, most active film restoration projects involve carefully digitizing the movies for preservation). If you have carefully separated your negatives, and store them in a temperature and humidity controlled environment, you can slow down the deterioration, but not stop it altogether.

Prints from both digital and film sources are essentially identical - if you use the best technologies (pH neutral paper, etc) your prints from both medium will last about the same time. Unfortunately, of course, people tend to use the cheapest solution, not the best available solution - but that is a market choice, not a failing of the technology involved.

Film stock has always been DESIGNED to be temporary. In fact, I can't imagine that the film studios ever expected to get their prints back from the theaters in usable condition and they considered themselves lucky if they did.

In fact, film studios only recently have taken any interested at all in archiving. They are awful at it.

Backing up digital data for 100 years is actually pretty easy. Embed the data as a watermark in porn and post it on the Internet.:-)

But seriously, it is pretty easy. You start by realizing that you can't back it up for 100 years, but you can trivially back it up ten times for 10 years each. With analog media, you get degradation every time you make a copy of a copy, which makes long backup durations important. With digital data, this becomes moot.

getting people to back things up and store them for long periods of time

I've been scanning my family's color photographs preferentially over the older black and whites because many of them which are not even 30 years old have begun to fade into nothing.

Photographs are also not safe from fire or dampness.

So I don't think the situation has changed all that much. Most photos are junk, and the good ones tend to get distributed, printed, and thus inherently backed up. I know if I somehow lost my main drive, backup drive, and Mozy data I could recover most of my best pictures simply

Why not send your mother and father some CD's of the digital photos you want to restore? "Offsite backup" can really be as simple as that - send some discs or USB flash drives with stuff you want preserved to family or friends who live in a different building. Put some in a safe-deposit box in a bank if you have no one to send them too (or just want additional offsite copies).

In my experience, the real biggest 'problem' caused by digital photography is people don't tend to throw away the dreck. My parents h

Man who backs up to disk drives and LTO anyway....that is yesterday's backup. Today just throw your pictures up to Carbonite or Mozy, hell for true redundant backup head for Picasa and let it get indexed and flung across the web. Digital Photos have a lot more versatility than analog photos. Sure they aren't perfect but are eons past film in most cases. I have photos from my digital camera a decade ago, backed up and in multiple locations, slideshows readily available on my media PC for entertainment d

Actually, in minature formats like 35mm, scanning a print can give better file quality than scanning the negative, which is just physically too small for consumer-level scanners to scan sharply and without grain aliasing generally. But even a cheapo flatbed will spit out a decent file from a print, however.

I tend to agree. Negatives tend not to degrade nearly as much, both because the medium is more stable and because they are generally stored in darkness. Also, film scanners are designed to compensate for fading negatives. Print scanners don't expect to need to correct a washed out image. Finally, prints by their very nature throw away a significant portion of the contrast range of the original negative, so even a brand new print isn't as good as a proper negative scan.

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don't take my Kodachrome away

Bah! Ektachrome is a cheap substitute for Kodachrome. Literally. It was introduced as a cheaper film that was easier to develop, and which allowed fast shutter speeds in low light. Kodachrome, on the other hand, has always been for people who wanted the best quality possible, and wanted the images to last. Affordable digital sensors are still not equal to Kodachrome in dynamic range or in detail. A Kodachrome slide kept in optimal conditions will last nearly 200 years with only slight color degradatio

They contract out to the one lab left in the country that develops Kodachrome.

What about the other countries, you [slightly dim and insular person]? THE country my [posterior], [I have a low opinion of you].

(Altered to remove trollosity;-) ).

Last I heard, Dwayne's Photo in the US (not even owned by Kodak themselves) is the only lab in the *world* processing Kodachrome for end-users. The writing was been pretty obviously on the wall when things got to that stage.

If a business has been accredited by the BBB, it means the BBB has determined that the business meets the BBB Accreditation Standards, which include a commitment to make a good faith effort to resolve any consumer complaints. BBB accredited businesses pay a fee for accreditation review/monitoring and for support of BBB services to the public.

BBB accreditation does not mean that the business' products or services have been evaluated or endorsed by the BBB, or

I seriously doubt that. Unless they've been stored in sub-zero conditions, I guarantee you that your film has faded over the last twenty years. I suggest you read Henry Wilhelm's "The Permanence and Care of Color Photographs", the definitive work on traditional photographic permanence.

It will have faded, but less than other colour films. IIRC, the estimated colour lifetime of Kodakchrome was about 60 years, vs 30 years for E6 process film and 200 years for conventional B&W negatives.

this is not a sign of anything. the article is being used by the submitter in an attempt to prove a point that he wants to make. in fact, if you read the entire article the assertion of the summary is clearly not supported. this film is hard to develop and there is only one lab in the US that does so. it also is among the worst-selling film that Kodak makes:

Kodachrome accounted for less than 1 percent of the company's total sales of still-picture films

so the story here is that Kodak got rid of the bottom selling film of their line. companies do that all the time, and this has nothing to do with digital cameras. film is still sold pervasively and easy developed at dozens of establishments in most towns.

was that 'compact optical disk' refreshed continuously, with a secondary copy in case of corruption of the first?if so, then I dare say the picture on that disk is going to be better than your Kodachrome slide.

media deteriorates, whether we like it or not. That goes for negatives and photographic prints just as well as for 'digital media'. negatives and prints, in our eyes, deteriorate gracefully.. that is to say that if the colors fade a little, that's okay.. we can still see the overall picture. Wherea

so the story here is that Kodak got rid of the bottom selling film of their line. companies do that all the time, and this has nothing to do with digital cameras. film is still sold pervasively and easy developed at dozens of establishments in most towns.

Oh, don't be disingenuous. Digital is clearly killing off niche photographic product development and manufacture. Kodachrome was successful because it offered fantastic color representation, at once vivid and subtle, and combined it with what was once considered razor-fine grain... but because it's an oddball process, Kodak has little incentive to continue its development now that sales of all film have tanked, and E6-process films have caught up with it in terms of grain, if not color representation*.

Digital is clearly killing off niche photographic product development and manufacture.

ah, well, i am going to disagree there. i can't ignore the resurgence in interest in lomography [lomography.com] and the fact that chain retailers [urbanoutfitters.com] are selling the Holga. for example, redscale film [lomography.com] is just newly being manufactured so that you don't have to wind it yourself. i would argue that the niche is alive and well.

in my estimation, it is the mainstream casual photographers that have converted wholesale to digital. good riddance. most (like my parents) couldn't get a film snapshot that wasn't jacked up to save

I see replies about the death of film, when this was less than 1% of Kodaks film sales per year. Kodachrome is difficult to process, expensive to maintain the equipment for, and has been slowly being phased out for over 50 years, ever since the killing of it in the large format. What the people here do tend to ignore is that for the death of 1 stock, Kodak has introduced new stocks, such as the Ektar 1 and E100D, that truely are visual marvels, cheaper to process and maintain, and most of all, can be upgraded to newer speeds/processes far cheaper than the now almost 80 year old Kodachrome technology. I do think Kodak has made a lot of mis-steps for Film, and I will miss Kodachrome, but I do not call this a mistake in the least.

While digital is doing a pretty good job displacing film for the majority of 35mm photography and below, the barriers to entry for medium format digital are so high that film is still going strong there.

From the song "KODACHROME"Paul SimonTranscribed by Randy Goldberg(original URL [lyricsdownload.com])

...Kodachrome, it gives us those nice bright colorsGives us the greens of summersMakes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah!I got a Nikon camera, I love to take a photographSo momma, don't take my Kodachrome away...

Polaroid is trying to bring back the instant photo, in the form of a small digital camera/printer that can instantly print your digital photo. Sounds pretty cool actually! Polaroid Pogo [coolest-gadgets.com]

I would argue that the transition from analog to digital was actually remarkably quick. The last analog camera I bought was in 2000, I think. Also, cell phones and small point and shoots effectively replaced disposable cameras years ago.

My guess is the only people who used film after 2005 are *some* professionals and artists.

yes, the workers bought the last Polariod one-step film plant in Holland, days before the machinery was to be junked, and are trying to reinvent the material.

seems Polaroid used up all the critical chemicals before dumping the product, the process is basically lost.

that won't happen for Kodachrome. initially only Kodak processed the film, nobody else, they had at one time 28 labs nationwide. then they outsourced the processing lab at Kansas city to Duane's, and closed the rest.

At least the analog photography industry knows how to change with the times.

That's like saying that the buggy whip industry knew how to change with the times.

What they know is that Kodachrome isn't selling as well as it used to, therefore it's not worthwhile for them to manufacture it any more. It's not due to any extreme cleverness or long term strategic planning on their part.

This is basically the same way that Intel got out of the DRAM business. If you read Grove's book Only the Paranoid Survive, he describes how Intel avoided losing their shirts in the DRAM wars not by being extremely clever in forseeing that the DRAM market was going to become brutally competitive, but by their standard business planning based on costs of wafer starts and profits of various kinds of products. When DRAM became less profitable, fewer wafer starts were allocated to DRAM and more allocated to other products, eventually to the point that they were making almost no DRAM. They realized what had happened AFTER the fact.

Kodachrome was killed by Fuji's Velvia and Kodak's own Ektachrome E100-series professional films years ago. They're both much easier to process (cheaper and more environmentally friendly), as archival, and provide a variety of color palettes to choose from. K64 was around for nostalgia, and nostalgia kept people buying it and Dwayne's processing it for many years beyond what made economic sense.

Polaroid "died" within the past year, moron, not long ago, and there's a group trying to resuscitate it. Polaroid sheet film is not equalled by anything in the digi-toy world, especially type 55.

If you want to know how long Kodak will keep a product going, they discontinued their last dry plate film in 2002. That's an emulsion on a glass plate, a technology that Kodak introduced in 1879 (replacing the wet plate technology, look it up). A flexible transparent base for film was introduced in 1899, meaning they kept the "outdated" glass plate technology going for 103 years after its replacement came along.

Most slashdot readers are probably not aware of what Kodachrome is, which is necessary to understand in order to see why Kodak is discontinuing it.

Kodachrome uses chemical technology that is essentially unchanged from the 1930s. Instead of embedded dye in the film emulsion, as is done in all other color films in use today, the film is essentially black and white, with filter layers, and the dyes are added during processing. Further complicating processing is a requirement for exposure to light of particular colors and intensities between chemical baths. Because of the complicated processing and the tight coupling between the nature of the film and the details of the processing steps, there has been no change to the Kodachrome technology since the introduction of the rarely-used higher speed Kodachrome in the early 1970s.

Meanwhile, competing slide films (Velvia, metioned upthread, also Kodak's older Ektachrome and more recent Lumiere and E100VS series films) continued to improve at least through the late 1990s. In addition to processing easy enough that it can be done in a home lab, these films are higher speed, higher resolution, less grainy, and offer more saturated colors. Continued production of Kodachrome (or, more likely, continued release of emulsions that have been in climate controlled storage for many years) has mainly served a tiny niche of photographers who have built a personal style around the film, plus a few curious newcomers.

Aside from the aforementioned "personal photographic style" considerations, Kodachrome has been practically obsolete for around 30 years, because starting around 1975 or so the last of the serious problems with E-6 process films (Ektachrome etc) -- stability during lengthy archival storage and shadow detail -- were solved.

The presence of good alternatives in other transparency films makes this a non-event. Should we see the day when transparency film is categorically unavailable, that will be an occasion for much greater wailing and gnashing of teeth.

I used to be a astrophotographer and Kodachrome had much better color and sensitivity than Ektachrome or negative color film. However, I haven't dabble in astrophotography for over 20 years but what I see on astronomy websites from people using digital SLRs it appears that most film is dead, except for evidence photography. As for evidence photography, since there is a negative/positive that if you alter it will show unlike digital photography.

I never really thought I'd be so saddened by the loss of any film stock, but I reconnected with Kodachrome through a massive effort to scan over a thousand slides from my family's life in 2008 - 75% of which were Kodachrome.

My canon point+shoot digitla is great and I still carry it, but it's rare that I take the time to get a good photo, they are mostly snapshots. I now have a cheap 6x6 TLR that shoots on roll film. There's something about the 6x6 film format, with all its impracticality, that helps me enjoy the moment of shooting the picture and enjoy the resulting photo more. Even if I still am a lousy photographer.

as many have already pointed out Kodachrome has been replaced by better film... thats the real story here it has nothing to do with dropping film for digital... kodak has just released Ektar and the take up has been big. Fuji just re-released Velvia in ISO50...If film is nolonger cost effective why have Kodak spend so much R&D money on Ektar ?

There is a film revival happeing at the moment as professionals and serious amateurs return to film, for many reasons.

Seriously, i am not sure what you are talking about...Film has _some_ advantages, i will admit it. But low-light performance is NOT one of them.In fact, it is telling that the area where you need best low light performance was the first to switch to CCDs (Astronomy).

Modern pro-DSRL can make pictures at ISO 12800 and higher, with reasonable noise levels (consumer DSRL can still do 800 or 1600 without looking too crappy).Any film that would try to match that would look like a nice case of modern art, and not a photograph.

A $200 digital point-and-shoot will typically produce more noise at ISO's of say, 800 and up than an equivalently priced film point-and-shoot.

The fact that the very best digitals are capable of extreme ISO settings is relevant only to the few who can afford them.

Beyond that, film vs. digital is a pointless discussion. On the one hand, some diehards refuse to see any value in digital, and, on the other, some folks always equate "digital" with "better". Both positions are wrong.

There remains a strong community of film users. Whether film is "better" is not the point. The point is they like film. People who are cellphone shooters and think everything about photography can be summed up in megapixels and resolution might not understand.

Like all other technologies, its not the features, its what you do with them. I've taken good pictures and some Interesting things [youtube.com] with my $600 Canon digital rebel xti. I recently bought a cheap $33 remote timer made by a Hong Kong company so that I can do more time lapse stuff. You don't need to spend a lot, you just need to be innovative. $2000 won't buy you that.

Like all other technologies, its not the features, its what you do with them. I've taken good pictures and some Interesting things [youtube.com] with my $600 Canon digital rebel xti.

Amen to that. We paid a professional photographer $1600 to cover our wedding... but a couple of my favorite pictures were taken by my cousin with a free disposable camera. They're all about the timing and the framing (and catching the photographer ordering us around;-).

There are some very good used dSLRs in the $200 range, and some decent new ones in the $600 range. I've been wanting one and was surprised how much new ones have come down, and how well really old but well regarded dSLRs retain their value. I was hoping to get a 6mp Nikon body only for about $100. They're not that cheap yet.

My experience in Texas has been that the Nikon N2 is pretty much ubuquitous at schools which still have/use/teach darkroom techniques. Usually the N2 is a school loaner unit but they're not difficult to find used. Most people I know are taking DSLR classes these days.

In my uni, it is whatever they can get their hands on, usually their dead granddads kit or their parents. I've seen first start on medium format, holga or a Canon A1. I understand your point though since I started on the K1000 as well.

You're probably not going to get RAW mode in any compact in that price range... Not with stock firmware, anyway. The first compact that comes to mind with RAW mode is the Canon G10 and its predecessor, the G9.

Alternatively most of the PowerShot and Ixus range can run CHDK, which adds RAW mode, a live histogram, and a few other really neat toys to the Canon firmware.

Intel phases out Pentium II for Pentium III ! This is the death of processors!

Not a good comparison, you can't say the new thing that is the same thing as the old thing indicates the death of the old thing, because paradoxically you would be inferring that the new thing is death to things like the new thing, which is like the old thing, but not the old thing, its the same thing - but better.

You need things that fulfill the same role but are a different technology entirely.
DVD vs. VHS
Automobile vs. Horse drawn buggy
Implants vs. Tissue Paper

Thats just nonsense. It's will be a *very long time* before the pixels on a digital camera approach the size of a silver halide molecule. Most high-quality photography is still done on large-format film stock (Fuji Velvia or similar, in 6x7 of 4x5) which is then scanned to get a digital file. I routinely use Velvia in 2 1/4", scan it, and turn my $75 Yashica-Mat into a 55 MP digital camera. Side by side with my Nikon D90, there's no comparison in the image quality for appropriate subjects.